Philip Kerr - Esau

‘Just before Rebecca’s team leader attacked me, I found something on the forest floor. Really I only got half a look at it, and then the attack put it right out of my mind until now. You see, I have some solar panels on the roof of my house back in Danville. Well, this thing I found on the forest floor looked just like a piece of one of those solar panels. I remember wondering if it could have come off my SCE suit when I got clipped the first time. Only it couldn’t have. It was too big and flat.’

‘So if it didn’t come off your suit, then what did it come off?’ asked Swift.

‘Not someone else’s roof, that’s for sure,’ said Cody.

Jack rubbed his jaw thoughtfully as something else seemed to occur to him now.

‘Actually, I figure that whatever it was must have landed there,’ said Jack.

‘Landed there?’ said Mac. ‘You mean like a bloody spaceship?’

‘Yes. Why not? Just before the avalanche that killed Didier, we both believed that we heard something in the sky. We thought it must have been a meteorite. But meteorites aren’t the only flying objects that fall to Earth. And they’re certainly not solar-powered. It just came to me, just now. It must have been some kind of satellite. Perhaps even a military one. You know, like a spy satellite. At the very least some kind of satellite that might be important enough to retrieve. That would explain how we suddenly got the funding for the whole expedition when the National Geographic Society had already turned us down. Of course — that’s why Boyd is here. He’s their man. That’s their angle. His job must be to retrieve this satellite.’

‘Whose man?’ asked Warner. ‘Who are we talking about?’

‘The CIA.’

‘Oh, come on. Jack. We’re getting a little carried away here, aren’t we?’ said Warner.

‘No, it all makes perfect sense.’ He looked around uncomfortably. ‘You’re sure he’s in his lodge?’

Jutta nodded.

‘But I don’t understand why a satellite would cause Rebecca to be mildly radioactive,’ she said.

‘Well, I’m no space engineer, but I do know that with some satellites, solar cells are only half the story. There has to be some kind of secondary power source, for when the satellite is eclipsed by the earth. Especially one that includes the two poles. The power necessary for one of these is quite considerable. I dunno. Some kind of nuclear reactor perhaps.’

‘Not by Uncle Sam,’ said Warner. ‘We don’t build that kind of satellite. Not these days. We’re environmentally friendly since Skylab fell to Earth back in 1979. Besides, then you wouldn’t need the solar panels. No, I expect it’s probably some kind of thermonuclear generator, perhaps heated by a small radioisotope. It needn’t be any bigger than the kind of thing you’d get in an X-ray machine. I’d have thought that would be more than enough to give Rebecca a reading.’

‘Especially if she handled it,’ added Cody. ‘We know she likes shiny objects. She’s got Didier’s ring, right?’

‘Look, there’s an easy way we can check my theory,’ said Jack. ‘The gloves I was wearing when you carried me back in here. Does anyone know where they are?’

The sirdar walked over to a pile of discarded clothing heaped at the edge of the clamshell.

‘They are here, Jack sahib.’ He rummaged in the pile and then held the gloves aloft triumphantly.

‘Of course, I only had my hand on it for a moment or two.’

Jack took the right-hand glove, with which he had handled the shard of solar panel, and put it on.

‘Give me a reading on that thing, will you, Byron?’

Cody picked up the radiometer and held it over the glove. The needle moved.

‘It’s reading,’ said Cody. ‘The same reading I got on Rebecca.’

‘Q.E.D.,’ said Jack. He took off the glove and threw it back with the rest of the suit.

‘So what do we do here?’ said Mac.

‘I don’t know,’ said Jack.

‘Why don’t we ask him about it?’ said Jutta. ‘Boyd, I mean. When he comes back here.’

‘Okay,’ said Swift, searching the faces of her colleagues. ‘Are we all agreed? We’ll ask him when he gets back in here.’

‘Heee-rrrr,’ said Rebecca, breaking the tension.

Everyone smiled.

‘Rebecca shows a remarkable propensity to develop her linguistic skills,’ observed Cody, ‘and to extend them quite spontaneously. Her ability to adapt to a situation is impressive, to say the least. I wonder just what she might be capable of.’

Lincoln Warner, who had been silent for a while, cleared his throat loudly.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I might be able to answer that. She might be capable of doing just about anything we can do. There’s something about Rebecca I think you ought to know. Something remarkable.’

CASTORP. WE ARE PLEASED THAT YOU THINK YOU MAY BE ABOUT TO COMPLETE YOUR MISSION, BUT AT THE SAME TIME WE HAVE STRONGLY ROOTED OBJECTIONS TO ANY COURSE OF ACTION THAT MIGHT RESULT IN YOUR HARMING ANY OF THE SCIENTISTS WHO HAVE BEEN YOUR UNWITTING HOSTS. YOUR MISSION WILL BE REGARDED AS A FAILURE IF IT INVOLVES THE DEATH OF ANY AMERICAN CITIZEN. MOREOVER, THIS OFFICE AND THIS OFFICE ONLY WILL DETERMINE ISSUES OF NATIONAL SECURITY AS THEY AFFECT THE UNITED STATES. PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE BY RETURN IMMEDIATELY UPON RECEIPT OF THIS E-MAIL TO INDICATE YOUR COMPLIANCE. HUSTLER.

Bryan Perkins and Chaz Mustilli sat in Perrins’s office and waited for CASTORP to acknowledge their last message. The configuration of the CIa’s e-mail server meant that they knew CASTORP had already collected the message from his In Box. But fifteen minutes passed and still he did not acknowledge his compliance. Perrins turned to his desktop PC and typed another e-mail, demanding that CASTORP acknowledge. This time Perrins’s message remained uncollected.

‘He must have collected the last message and turned off his laptop,’ said Mustilli.

‘That’s what I think,’ agreed Perrins. ‘Shit.’ He shook his head. ‘Is there anything we can do? To protect those people?’

‘I can’t think of anything.’

‘Damn it, Chaz, we’ve got to do something. We can’t just let him murder them.’

‘Maybe we could try calling the Royal Nepal Police. See if they could send a detachment of men up there to protect them.’

‘Do it.’

‘But you know,’ added Mustilli, ‘if there is a nuclear war down there, he might turn out to be the least of their problems.’

‘And if there’s not a war?’

Chaz sucked hard on his empty pipe.

‘I’ll make that call.’

In the Sanctuary, the wind seemed finally to have blown itself out. Underneath the dark canopy, Lincoln Warner looked vaguely troubled by what he had to relate.

‘Most of our DNA doesn’t add up to very much,’ he said. ‘Molecules that once had a function are now lost. For example, when we had gills or used our tails to hang on to branches. It’s like finding a key for a lock in a door to a house that no longer exists. Except that there are thousands of such doors. The main molecules that concern us have to do with the long chains of amino acids we call proteins. Haemoglobin for one. That’s made up of two amino acid chains each described by a single bit of DNA. A single gene, if you like. Okay, that’s something you can’t see. But genes influence how you are seen, what you look like.

‘Now take a human being and a chimpanzee. Only one-point-six percent of our DNA differs from chimp DNA. Although as a matter of interest, that doesn’t include those genes that describe our haemoglobin. You’d be right if you said that it’s different genes that prevent a chimp from speaking like we do. We don’t actually know which genes they are. All we can say with any certainty is that they’re part of that elusive one-point-six percent difference I was just talking about. Just think of that for a moment. Ninety-eight-point-four percent of our genes are normal chimp genes. And that one-point-six percent difference? Why, it’s less than that between two species of gibbons. Zero-point-six percent less, to be exact.